> "Ian Mallett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 7/14/07, Dave LeCompte (really) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> That works for OGG and WAV sounds, but does not work for other music >> files, like MP3, MOD, and MIDI, right? > > Oh, opps. You're probably right. I'm curious now, why don't you know the > length of the file? Conceivably, you might want to intelligently deal with music provided by the user. For example: - some games, including "The Sims", allow players to put their own music into a certain directory, and the game will take advantage of the music. - some games, including "Monster Rancher", use user-provided music as an integral part of gameplay. With "Monster Rancher", players inserted a CD, which seeded the procedural content routines for making monsters. I was thinking more about some crude ways to get approximate answers, and I was thinking that the file size on disk might be a guide to the duration of the song. For MP3, I think typical compression ratios (vs a 44kHz 16 bit stereo WAV file) is something like 11:1, so you can do the math (or, better yet, just look at a collection of known MP3s and figure out an average multipler) to convert from bytes to seconds. However, this doesn't work for MIDI or MOD music - for MIDI, a song with four instruments playing in harmony might use four times the space as a solo for the same length of time. MOD music is even less predictable, as the sound patches are a large part of the file size, and there's little knowing how many times any patch might be used. That said, I think that specific modules for the various file types exist that could be used to determine the duration of MP3 and MIDI, and maybe even MOD. -Dave LeCompte
